Video Tutorial

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Setting up Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the AMP plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you can head over to Appearance » AMP page to see how your site looks on mobile devices using AMP.

You can change the header background and text color on this page. The header background color you choose will also be used for links.

The plugin will also use your site’s icon or logo if your theme supports it. See our guide on how to add a favicon or site icon in WordPress for detailed instructions.

Don’t forget to click on the save button to store your changes.

You can now visit any single post on your website and add /amp/ at the end of the URL. Like this:

This will show you a stripped down AMP version of the same post.

If you view the source code of the original post, you will find this line in the HTML:

<link rel="amphtml" href="http://example.com/2016/10/my-blog-post/amp/" />

This line tells search engines and other AMP consuming apps/services where to look for the AMP version of the page.

Troubleshooting:

If you see a 404 error when trying to view the amp version, then here is what you need to do.

Visit Settings » Permalinks page in your WordPress admin and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button. Remember, don’t change anything here, just press the save button. This will refresh your website’s permalink structure.

View Accelerated Mobile Pages in Google Search Console

Want to know how your Accelerated Mobile Pages are doing in Google Search? You can easily check this using the Google Search Console.

Log in to your Google Search Console dashboard and then click on Search Appearance » Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Don’t worry if you don’t see your AMP results right away. It may take a while for Google to index your Accelerated Mobile Pages and then show data in Search Console.

Extending and Customizing Your Accelerated Mobile Pages

The AMP plugin for WordPress comes with very limited customization options. However you can use some other WordPress plugins to add few more customizations.

If you are already using Yoast SEO, then you need to install and activate the Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP.

It is an add-on plugin for Yoast SEO and AMP plugins. Upon activation, you need to visit SEO » AMP page to configure plugin settings.

The plugin allows you to enable AMP support for other post types.

On the design tab, you can choose colors and design options. You can also upload a logo and a default header image which will be used when a post does not have its own featured image.

You can switch to the Analytics tab to add your Google Analytics ID.

Don’t forget to click on the save settings button to store your changes.

There are many more plugins which will allow you to add related posts, footer widgets, and even social media icons to your AMP pages.

However, you need to make sure to validate your AMP pages after you install any addon plugins.

We hope this article, helped you learn how to set up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 19 actionable tips to drive traffic to your WordPress site.

The post How to Properly Setup Google AMP on Your WordPress Site appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

Do you know who Chandler Bolt is?

If you’re an online marketing nerd like me, you probably do.

But, if you’re part of the other 99.9% of the world who isn’t super excited about this “Internet marketing stuff,” you’ve probably never heard of this man.

So, what is he doing with this headline on Business Insider?

How did he get on there?

Is he rich or something? Yes, he is indeed.

That’s part of the beauty of online marketing.

This 21-year-old kid has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his kitchen table.

No need for fame, magazine interviews, talk show visits, or acting classes (you know, to act in a blockbuster movie).

You have no clue who Chandler Bolt is. But he has made tons of money, and he’s also helping others do the same.

His company, Self-Publishing School, helps people publish books on Amazon and make a living from it.

If you’re an introvert, that’s a cause to celebrate!

Fewer than 20 years ago, extroverts had a way better chance of becoming rich and successful.

Why? It involved a ton of networking.

You had to hire employees and build a huge company. Or, for a career in arts, music, movies, etc., you had to get every person in your industry to know you.

While connections are still a huge deal, today you can get them right from your couch (or from your living room floor in my case).

As a single individual, you can build a huge business from the comfort of your home after work, during your afternoons, and on your weekends.

I don’t think that I’m being overly dramatic when I say that online marketing is your shot at the life of your dreams.

Trust me — I would know.

I want you to have as much fun at work as these guys and I do. So, today I’ll introduce you to this world with my online marketing guide.

Note: Even if you’re deep down the rabbit hole already, you can still learn a ton of new things from the following examples.

If you’re interested in a particular topic, feel free to jump ahead:

• Definition
• Overview
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing
• Content marketing
• Why content marketing?
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Everything that you need to know about Google AdWords
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing

Definition

If you’ve read my previous guide on digital marketing, you already know that it’s different.

Not every digital marketing campaign is automatically an online marketing effort.

According to TNMedia, online marketing is “…any tool, strategy or method of getting the company name out to the public. The advertisements can take many different forms and some strategies focus on subtle messages rather than clear-cut advertisements.”

Want the drop-dead simple version of it?

Online marketing is any effort to spread the word about your company that uses the Internet to reach people.

Basically, it’s anything that you do online to get more eyeballs on you, grab people’s attention, and hopefully, at some point, get them to buy from you.

There are seven major sub-categories of online marketing that I want to cover in this guide.

Overview

We’ve already talked about search engine optimization (SEO), and I showed you all of the important aspects of it that you have to get right.

Next to SEO, there’s search engine marketing (SEM), which is simply the paid version of SEO.

Marketers pay Google to display ads in their search results in the hopes that they will drive traffic (especially interested people, or leads) to their product landing pages.

Then there’s content marketing. This is where marketers try to create valuable media and content to distribute to potential future customers. This is the good guy version of online marketing where you mostly try to guilt people into buying.

Of course, you already know social media marketing, which is where you use one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build relationships, and then send them to your products and services.

Pay per click advertising (or PPC) is similar to search engine marketing, but it isn’t limited to Google and its competitors. Most social media networks let you create ads that integrate naturally into their feeds, allowing you to pay for clicks to your website.

Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing where you share profits with fellow marketers in exchange for promoting each other’s products.

And finally, there’s email marketing, which some already consider old-school. But it’s still one of the most effective channels. Once your customers have given you permission to contact them, you can email them at any time, providing value and asking them to buy when the time is right.

You can already guess how big online marketing really is. You know how huge of a space each of these individual categories fill.

I mean, just think about how many social media platforms you can name off the top of your head:

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube, Periscope, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon…

OK, you get the point.

I want to give you a good grip on all of these categories just like in our beginner’s guide, yet not drown you in the vast information that’s out there.

That’s why I’ll give you one example in each category of someone who absolutely crushes it in their niche along with some great points to help you get started.

Ready. Set. Go!

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

It goes without saying that I think Quick Sprout is one of the best sites when it comes to SEO (we’re kind of a big deal, I think).

Our Advanced Guide to SEO alone has gotten thousands of shares.

But, instead of spending an entire category bragging, I want to point you to someone who is a true search engine marketing ninja who has worked for us at Quick Sprout for quite some time.

I want to point him out not only because he has all of the SEO skills you need up his sleeve, but also because he is super underrated.

Every time I read an article like“15 SEO Gurus That You Should Know for 2015,” I’m shocked that he’s not on there.

Brian Dean, aka Backlinko, might be flying under the radar. But when you start Googling around and learning SEO, you’re bound to bump into him.

He outranks huge sites like Wikipedia, Forbes, and Copyblogger, and he completely dominates the SEO space with his super long case studies that provide actionable, step-by-step instructions for upping your SEO game.

Backlinko ranks #1 AND #2 for “how to get backlinks.”

What’s great about his blog is that instead of just rounding up SEO news like Search Engine Land and others do, he actually shows you how to implement good SEO techniques that work.

As I outlined in one of the previous guides in this series, SEO is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

Brian is one of the best sources on the web for you to learn how to do search engine marketing right.

For example, Brian recently published an article called “How to get backlinks with guestographics.”

There, he does two things.

1. He shows you the results that prove thatthe strategy works.

2. He gives you detailed steps that you can follow to execute it.

As a case study, he talks about someone who he’s helped pull off this strategy in their niche.

You see the results, and then you can just scroll down and follow along as you read. In this case, the steps are:

• Step 1: Publish an Awesome Infographic
• Step 2: Simple (But Effective) Link Prospecting
• Step 3: Show Them Your Infographic
• Step 4: Bribe Your Prospects With Free Content
• Step 5: Get Your Contextual Links

That’s easy to follow, right? So, what’s the catch?

It’s hard to execute. It takes time.

And that’s the reason that not many people do it. Be one of the few who does and you’ll get the results.

Just check out this backlink that we got to a Quick Sprout infographic:

Do you want more proof?

Go through the entire Backlinko blog. You’ll find fewer than 40 posts over the last several years.

If Brian’s SEO didn’t work, then he would never have been able to grow Backlinko to 100,000+ monthly readers, 100,000 email subscribers, and such a massive SEO brand with fewer than 40 blog posts.

The following three blog posts are the best ones to help you get started:

• How to rank for any keyword
• Link Building: The Definitive Guide
• Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List

Within search engine optimization, there are two big sectors to be aware of:

On-page and off-page SEO. Let’s dive into each.

On-Page SEO

Over the past few years, Google has made numerous updates to their algorithms.

Data tells us that Google makes up to 600 changes to their algorithm every single year.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with Google’s rapid pace and changing user behavior.

But one thing that’s remained relatively constant is conducting on-page SEO.

Most on-page activities for SEO aren’t linked to direct ranking factors, but rather to indirect factors like click-through rate and time on site.

For example, an on-page SEO task that’s common is to optimize your meta description and title tag:

Your title tag and meta description are what shows up on a given Google search result. For example, if someone searches for “SEO Tips,” my post will show up with the headline and description that I’ve personally customized.

While placing keywords in the title and description can help users navigate the content faster (as seen by the bolded text), it doesn’t directly increase rankings.

So simply stuffing keywords in your meta and title tags isn’t an option.

But they do contribute to click-through rate. When your title tags and meta descriptions are more compelling or related to the topic that someone is searching for, you can expect higher click-through rates.

And the higher the CTR, the higher the chance of ranking better.

Google is all about providing the best user experience possible. So if Google notices that your post that ranks at #10 is getting a higher CTR than the post above you, they will move your content up.

On-page SEO consists of a few major elements to be aware of:

• Crawl errors
• Keyword research
• Page optimization
• Speed

In this section, I’ll walk you through how you can improve each of these elements to get your on-page SEO on the right track.

Crawl errors

Crawl errors can be anything from a 404 error (broken link) to duplicate content. And all of these issues can plague your website with:

• Slow speeds
• Impacted rankings
• Penalties from Google
• Increased risk of users leaving your site (bouncing)

If you’ve ever seen this on your site, it’s a broken link error that can cause major problems:

For example, 404 errors can impact your traffic heavily if another external source is linking to them.

If you’ve gotten your content featured on another site, but the link is broken, you’re losing out on tons of traffic.

One of the fastest tools to fix crawl errors that could be harming your site is Screaming Frog.

It’s a technical SEO tool that can scan your website for free, telling you detailed information on what you need to fix and how to do it:

When scanning your site, be sure to look for common problem areas like:

• Duplicate or missing content
• 404 errors

These issues are all too common on the majority of sites.

Keyword research

Keyword research is a fundamental process in any online marketing game plan for SEO.

Keywords are what you search in a search engine to find the content you are looking for.

For example, type “SEO Guide” into Google — that would be a keyword. And pages can target these keywords to compete in the rankings.

There are a few types of keywords to be aware of before conducting a basic keyword research strategy. There are two major kinds:

• Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are longer keywords made up of 3-5+ words. They are often easier to target due to specificity, less traffic, and less competition.
• Head keywords: Head or short-tail keywords are one-word or two-word keywords that are more general. For example, “basketball shoes” would be a competitive head keyword.

A good SEO strategy will target a mixture of both of these kinds of terms.

Short-tail keywords will be much more competitive because they are more general (and therefore have a higher volume).

On the other hand, long-tail keywords will get you less traffic but will convert better:

To conduct keyword research, all you need to do is head to a keyword tool like Moz or the AdWords Keyword Planner.

Simply start by entering the basic topic that you want to cover for your next post or page:

Searching for your basic keyword will give you a list of metrics telling you the volume (how many searches per month), difficulty (competition ranking for it), and the number of clicks that come from organic search.

Lastly, it will also give you keyword suggestions.

Generally speaking, when looking to target keywords for your next blog post, you want to find long-tail terms with higher volumes and lower difficulty scores.

Then, you can take that keyword and follow the next steps under page optimization!

Page optimization

Page optimization is a critical step in the process of SEO. Page optimization involves doing a few basic tasks to optimize your page for specific keywords and for search engines.

Remember: You’re writing content and optimizing pages for both the user and the search engine.

Everything from URLs to internal links can have an impact on your page performance.

This on-page SEO checklist from Backlinko is one of my favorite ways to stay on top of every new blog post that I write:

All of these factors help you to both add context to the page for Google and structure it in a friendly way for the user.

For example, when you search for an article on Google, you expect to get something similar to your search:

Everything from the permalink (URL) to the title and structure of your post (h1 and h2 headings) makes a difference in how Google scans your content and how user-friendly it is.

The better on-page optimization you have, the longer users will stay around to consume your content.

Plus, optimizing things like internal links (where you link to another article on your site from a new post) will help you drive users throughout your entire site.

Always be sure to follow the on-page SEO cheat sheet above when you write new blog posts.

Improve your page speed

One of the biggest factors for success is improving the speed at which your page loads.

When it comes to SEO, you want your content to load fast. Google prefers websites that load fast as well.

Studies have shown time and time again that top-ranking sites are faster than their lower-ranking competitors:

According to their latest reports, as page load times increase by just a few seconds, the likelihood that someone will leave your site increases dramatically.

If your site loads in ten seconds, you can expect users to run for the hills.

Google’s current standards state that best practices are three seconds or below. Yet the majority of businesses in every industry are still too slow:

Thankfully, Google offers free tools like Test My Site and Pagespeed Insights. Each of these can help you improve your site speed dramatically.

When you improve your site speeds, you can expect users to stay around on your site, reducing bounce rates that can negatively impact your organic rankings.

Always continue to test your site speed and improve where you can. These tools will help you fix any lingering problems by offering detailed, step-by-step solutions under each problem area.

Off-Page SEO

What’s off-page SEO? It’s simply the opposite of on-page SEO.

That means that it’s all of the factors and activities that you can do (off-page) to raise the ranking of your site on search engines.

There are a few major ways that off-page SEO comes into play. Everything from link building to social promotion and content syndication can improve your off-page SEO.

Even things like guest blogging or writing a promotional piece on another site can result in a link (i.e., off-page SEO).

Here are a few ways to rank higher with off-page SEO.

Link building is critical

Link building is the most important factor in any off-page SEO strategy. According to a video from 2016 featuring Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, links and content were tied as the top two ranking factors.

Google confirmed this official video. Links are one of the biggest factors when it comes to ranking in a given search result.

When Brian Dean of Backlinko tested this with his own study, he found that the sites that rank number one dominate the competition in terms of backlinks.

The more links you have back to your site from other sites, the stronger authority you have in the eyes of Google. It means that your content is relevant.

But not just any links will do the trick. That same study found that top-ranking sites with backlinks had links from hundreds of different sites:

And the vast majority of those links were from the highest-ranking authorities in their space:

Link building is tough, but it’s necessary to compete with SEO for online marketing.

Ranking higher with links involves everything from your total number of links to the quality of those links and the diversity of the sources.

When it comes to getting links, you need great content. The majority of content ranking #1 on Google is stellar.

And that’s why they have thousands of links. The content is nearly unmatched!

In Moz’s book “How to Rank,” they explain the 90/10 rule of link building:

That means that you should spend 90% of your time creating amazing content and dedicate 10% of your time to link building.

Without great content, you won’t get the links you need to bring in more traffic and drive sales.

One of my favorite ways to build backlinks fast is by mentioning other influencers in my content. This adds great value to your content while also mentioning and giving praise to others.

And as we all know, humans love it when people lift their egos. It’s a great feeling to get compliments and praise for your knowledge in a space.

By tapping into that and getting value and input from influencers, you can easily drive backlinks.

For example, Shopify recently mentioned me in this post:

I was a featured influencer on the post because I gave them tons of input. So in this post, I received a backlink to my site in exchange for my time and effort.

But I have also linked to this post multiple times since simply because it mentions me.

Mentioning influencers is a great way to get them to share your post!

Do you want to build backlinks fast? Here are a few key resources:

• How to Build High-Quality Backlinks in a Scalable Way
• 9 Link Building Resources That’ll Increase Your Search Rankings
• 13 Efficient Link Building Strategies for Busy Marketers
• The Advanced Guide to Link Building

Social sharing

Social publishing is a great way to indirectly contribute to your off-page SEO strategy. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, it’s an off-page tactic that can lead to more backlinks.

Sharing your latest post on social media helps to spread it to new audiences. The more users you attract, the more brand awareness you get, and hopefully, the more links you can get as well.

Try using a tool like Buffer to schedule your content in advance:

Using platforms like LinkedIn is one of my favorite ways to conduct off-page SEO with social media as well.

Beyond simply sharing your latest posts, a great strategy is to write articles on LinkedIn, directing traffic back to your site.

Let me show you an example of a recent article I posted on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn articles are much different than simply pasting your blog post into the status update bar.

These articles are published content that alerts all of your connections each time a new article goes live. That means that each person who follows you will get a notification rather than having to stumble across it while scrolling through a timeline.

My favorite strategy for LinkedIn articles is to copy the introduction paragraph of my latest blog post and end it with [click to continue reading…].

I then hyperlink that phrase back to my full blog post on my site, driving tons of traffic and engagement!

To get started with this off-page SEO tactic, head to LinkedIn and select “Write an article”:

Next, add your featured image from your blog post and copy and paste the headline and intro paragraph:

Add your “click to continue reading” tag at the end and watch your traffic and links skyrocket.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the paid cousin of SEO.

Instead of optimizing your content and promoting it a lot to eventually show up as a top result for organic search engine results (which can often take a few months to happen even if you do it right), you can pay your way to the top.

And since it’s the first thing searchers see on the page, you’ll likely get a lot of hits to your site. But you also pay for each and every one.

Depending on what keyword you want to show up for, you pay different prices.

The keywords that people search a lot for are more competitive and are therefore more expensive.

Some keywords can cost several hundred dollars per click.

Some cost over $600 for a single click!

So, while it is a great strategy, it only works if you can immediately recoup your advertising costs.

Companies easily blow tens of thousands of dollars on Google AdWords campaigns, failing to make sure that they get their money’s worth.

To win with SEM, you have to offer a paid product or service.

When you’re still in the phase of producing free content to build an audience, don’t waste your time with SEM. You’ll run out of money faster than you can spell S-E-M.

Thankfully, avoiding the mistake of paying for worthless clicks is not as hard as you might think.

By setting up conversion goals inside of your campaign, you can track exactly who made a purchase from your ads, and you’ll know exactly how much money you spent and how much you made at any time.

Google has published several case studies of customers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google AdWords and yielded even better returns.

Their ROI (return on investment) is often way higher than any stock or real estate investment could be, creating 5x, 10x, and even 20x the ad spend in conversions. That’s Internet marketing at it’s finest!

A great source to get started with Google AdWords, whether you’re an established business or a solo entrepreneur sitting on his couch, is Jerry Banfield.

Jerry made a living as a full-time instructor on Udemy, often generating $30,000 or more in monthly income.

He was able to scale up his sales this much because of Google AdWords.

Prior to his solopreneur career, Jerry ran a one-man ad agency, helping businesses with their SEM. Once he had a few courses to sell, he went on to transfer his SEM skills to his own business.

Look at the kind of results he creates:

That’s an ROI of 4700%! That’s how powerful Google AdWords can be.

Even better, Jerry teaches everything he knows, and most of his lessons are free. By far, the best place to start learning Google AdWords is his free course on YouTube.

It walks you through everything that you need to know to set up your first campaign from scratch, and it’s over 3 hours long.

The lessons in this video alone are more than enough to help you get started.  And, once you’re ready to kick it up a notch, you can just get his Udemy course for over 9 hours of videos, detailed tutorials, and guides.

Content marketing

Jon Morrow is a master content crafter. After getting annoyed by how great content often suffers from little traffic and exposure, he set out to help people change that.

His blog, Boost Blog Traffic, boasts over 500,000 monthly readers.

As I taught you in the previous guide, content marketing is all about providing timely and relevant value to your audience.

The first step to doing that is knowing your stuff. And Jon did his homework! He’s built his blog into a six-figure income.

And that’s his monthly income!

That’s right: He makes more in a month than most people earn in a year. So it’s fair to assume that he’s good at online marketing.

And, he did all of it with just the power of his voice. Jon is paralyzed from the neck down.

When he decided to make marketing strategy a key focus of his blog, he knew that sharing the lessons that he learned when building his blog and former businesses would attract a lot of readers.

But, he also knew that he could get even more fans and potential customers by teaching people how to implement the marketing strategy that he used to growth hack his companies to these huge revenues in such a short time.

Similar to Backlinko, he often breaks down a marketing tactic step-by-step with screenshots, results, and detailed how-tos.

Super specific instructions like this are rare in any industry. If you can take people by the hand from A to B, that’s when you’ll build a loyal following.

What’s more, Jon often brings on guests to share their best tactics in the same manner so that you can learn about other ways of online marketing as well, such as building relationships, Google Analytics, and email marketing.

One way to learn what it takes to create awesome content is to just look at Jon’s writing.

For example, take a look at this intro.

In it, Jon coins an entirely new term that he introduces the reader to. He alienates the audience by addressing them as “them” even though every reader knows that Jon is talking to him or her personally.

Then, he explains his terms and compares a common blogger’s problem to a sickness. Anyone would want to know how to cure it! He creates a huge curiosity gap, and he immediately draws the reader in.

Another way to learn from him is by straight up reading his content about, well, creating content. Three good articles to start with are:

• Demystifying Epic Content: How to Actually Create It (Not Just Jabber About How Important It Is)
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Irresistible Subheads
• 20 Rules for Writing So Crystal Clear Even Your Dumbest Relative Will Understand

Why content marketing?

So, why do you need content marketing? Because content marketing is SEO.

According to Google, content is one of the top two ranking factors. The more amazing content you create, the higher the chance you have of bringing in new traffic and leads from organic search.

If you’re looking to start an SEO marketing strategy, you need to produce content. The only way that people will discover your company from organic search (from a non-branded search) is through content.

For example, if you are a law firm without a strong brand presence, you’ll need content that users are searching for to drive traffic.

You could publish an article on “Top 10 Things to Know When Getting in a Car Crash.” Blog content like this can drive inbound traffic to your website that you don’t have to pay for.

According to HubSpot, companies that post 16+ content pieces per month drive much more traffic than those that don’t:

Posting 16+ times per month not only drives traffic to your website, but it also increases the number of leads you get:

The more blog-based content you have, the more indexed pages on Google you have. Combine the two, and you have a lot of chances to get someone to visit your site:

Content marketing is the key to powerful SEO.

Sure, you can optimize your product pages and your homepage. But that won’t bring in traffic that doesn’t already know you.

Content marketing is the key to bringing in new visitors who haven’t heard of you!

Plus, the ROI of content marketing is massive:

In the first few months, costs per lead can drop by 80%.

While content marketing isn’t an overnight success like PPC might be, no other tactic can match its long-term viability.

Results might take a few months, but costs are overall much cheaper than paying for customer acquisition.

HubSpot’s State of Inbound report found that marketers are still focusing heavily on growing their organic presence through blog content creation.

Content marketing is still the number one task for the majority of businesses trying to generate more customers and sales.

Now is the time to hop aboard the content marketing train.

But what if you don’t want to blog? Well, you don’t have to. Here are the different forms of content marketing and how you can use them to fit your own business goals.

Forms of content marketing

Content comes in many more forms than writing.

For example, Daisy Jing grew Banish, her Shopify store, to earn $3 million in annual revenue by creating informative YouTube videos about acne.

Content can come in almost any form. It includes photos, blogs, podcasts, viral videos, and more:

If your strength isn’t blogging or writing, or if they simply aren’t a great fit for your business model, don’t stress about it.

As long as you are creating some form of unbranded content that users need, you’ll find success.

For example, can you develop videos to upload to YouTube? I currently create videos on the top marketing struggles or trends in my niche:

These videos serve as a form of content that can help me rank on Google searches while also providing valuable content on YouTube searches.

As always, this content serves a few major purposes for my company:

1. Building brand awareness: By spreading my content and my name with tons of videos, people start to recognize my brand.
2. Developing credibility and social proof: Posting informative, data-rich videos shows that I am a thought leader in my space, giving me instant credibility.
3. Driving traffic and sales: I produce all of my videos with ROI in mind.

But what if you don’t have the resources or time to create video-based content?

Try building a blog that focuses on photos like Pura Vida Bracelets does:

Their company sells bracelets with a charitable purpose, so blogging doesn’t really fit their niche.

Nobody wants to read about bracelets. They want photos of the bracelets and downloadable, lifestyle-based content.

Pura Vida meets these needs perfectly.

Blogging isn’t for everyone or every business. You simply need to find your content niche and start producing that content ASAP.

If you want to know more about other ways of creating content, take a look at my content marketing guide.

Content mapping by customer journey

One lingering question you may have is this:

How does content help to drive sales and bring in new customers?

Well, that answer is complicated. But the best way to summarize it is through a customer journey.

Let me explain:

When someone visits your site or interacts with your brand on social media for the first time, there is no chance that they will buy from you.

Why? Because they don’t know who you are!

Would you Google search for “shoes” and buy the first pair you saw? You probably wouldn’t.

Customers buy in a logical manner, following a specific journey from awareness to decisions. HubSpot calls this the buyer’s journey:

Customers move in progressive stages where they become aware of their problems, assess possible solutions, and then come to a decision.

This means that your content marketing efforts have to align with this journey. If you offer a user a lead magnet that requires them to give you information in the awareness stage, you’ll simply scare them off.

They don’t know your brand, so how can you expect them to give you information? You haven’t built the trust and credibility yet. The relationship isn’t there.

But if you ask for their information in the consideration stage, you’re right on track! They are brand aware and want high-value content.

Mapping your content to the customer journey means aligning your content efforts with each stage.

For example, check out this content marketing funnel:

In stage one, the consumer is aware of their problem and need to fix it. This would be a great opportunity to use an infographic or an easy-to-follow video to capture attention and develop interest.

In the second stage, the user is researching their options. As they move down the funnel, content starts to get better and better.

While blog posts are great for developing awareness, they aren’t going to convert a user to purchase. They simply exist to bring users in.

Later down the line, you can push lead magnets like white papers to drive a sale.

Be sure to always map your content to the buyer’s journey. If you need ideas, here is a checklist of content types for each stage of the funnel:

Content publishing and syndication

Once you’ve created content, the next step is to publish that content and syndicate it on as many platforms and sites as you can.

Content is great on its own, but it never hurts to boost it on social media or share it with other content creators.

This will help you drive more traffic and links to your content, increasing your chances of ranking and getting leads.

The most common step is to share content across social media platforms.

For example, using a tool like Buffer, you can schedule a new content piece to publish on every single social platform that your business is connected to:

I use this strategy to share every new blog post on social and to promote all of my latest pieces:

Syndication is another tactic to help expose your content to as many people as possible.

Content syndication is simply the process of publishing your content (blogs, videos, etc.) to third-party sites that will re-publish it on their own.

Do you want to syndicate your content and get more traffic? Check out my guide here:

• The Step-by-Step Guide to Syndicating Content (Without Screwing up Your SEO)

Social media marketing

Social media is a beast. This industry is gigantic, and its growth rate is scaring even me.

By now, there are hundreds of social media networks out there.

This topic deserves a whole guide on its own, but if you want to be successful with social media (and you’ll HAVE to in the long run), your best bet for a one-stop shop is Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gary is firing on all cylinders and platforms. He has written three New York Times bestsellers (two of which solely focus on how to use social media for your business), and he runs one of the biggest media agencies around.

He’s successful on Twitter because he’s witty and engages with lots of people individually. He has managed to amass 1.64 million followers on the platform.

On YouTube, he dominates with his #askgaryvee show, which he publishes every working day of the week.

Then, there’s his Facebook page with over 2.5 million likes and his Pinterest board with nearly 20,000 followers. And, of course, he couldn’t miss out on Instagram. He’s grabbed another 2.8 million followers there.

Several million people follow his every move. If you watch him closely, you can learn the art of social media from him.

One of the biggest takeaways from Gary is that content follows context.

He says, “Content is king, but context is god.” What he means is that if you don’t respect the context of each individual social media platform, you’re bound to lose.

For example, I could have posted this blog post as a Facebook status update, but would that make any sense? No!

No one consumes long-form content on Facebook. That’s what blogs and YouTube are for.

Twitter’s video platform, Vine, was immensely popular for a time. But lots of people completely failed at building a big following on it because they were putting out the wrong content.

If you only have 6 seconds to capture the attention of your viewers, the feeling you try to excite in them had better be strong.

Only two kinds of accounts were able to pull that off consistently: Musicians and comedians.

Go through the list of the top Viners, and you’ll see that 99% of them were comedians making short, funny videos.

Instead of seeing social media as a distribution channel where you push out the content that you created on one platform to all of the others, try to tell stories that match the context of each platform.

Since Gary is also a speaker, you can learn a ton about social media by watching his talks on YouTube.

But Gary’s not the only social media wizard out there, so here are a few other resources to help you learn how to thrive on various social media platforms:

• 17 Killer Facebook Post Ideas For Small Business Owners
• 20 Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Pinterest Features You Didn’t Know Existed (But Totally Should)
• Instagram Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Instagram Success
• The Biggest Social Media Science Study: What 4.8 Million Tweets Say About the Best Time to Tweet

How brands are using Instagram

Instagram is becoming one of the most popular social networks in the world:

At over 700 million monthly active users, they’ve surpassed Snapchat and Twitter combined.

In just a few years, Instagram has seen incredible growth.

Brands are tapping into this growth to showcase their products and drive sales.

One of my favorite examples of brand success on Instagram is HubSpot.

HubSpot excels at producing marketing and entrepreneur-related content for their followers.

Instagram is, of course, focused on visuals. And HubSpot taps into this by producing beautiful images and video-related content with marketing tips.

They perfectly combine inspiration with tactical tips for a great, well-rounded Instagram account.

Do you want to get started with Instagram marketing? Create an Instagram for your business and start posting content related to your niche.

If you need more tips, here are a few articles to get you going:

• Beginner’s Guide: How to Build a Killer Instagram Following and Increase Your Sales
• How to Get 300 Real, Targeted Instagram Followers Per Day

How brands are using Snapchat

Snapchat is another popular social network channel that can be huge for building brand awareness.

While it’s not as popular as Facebook or Instagram, it still works to create a following that engages with your content.

Currently, brands are finding huge success by using influencers to promote their content.

For example, Disney hired Mike Platco to post on their Snapchat account:

Leveraging his following, Disney was able to drive big sales and brand awareness.

Snapchat can be a great place to post behind-the-scenes content from your company like Everlane does:

Snapchat is great because the options are so diverse. You can post anything you want just like you can on Instagram.

Do you want to learn more about Snapchat marketing? Follow these tutorials:

• New Kid Alert: How to Drive Sales to Your Business Using Snapchat
• The 4 Principles of Successful Snapchat Marketing

2018 social media trends to be aware of

As consumer behavior changes and technology expands, trends will always be shifting.

Current trends show us that social media marketing is changing fast. While social platforms have always been amazing for organically reaching customers (and for free), that is slowly becoming less of a reality.

While Facebook once was the king of organic reach, it’s been declining for years now.

The organic reach levels are nearly at rock bottom compared to five or six years ago.

Why? The social media landscape is becoming a “pay to play” sector.

As social media platforms grow, they realize that ad revenue is their number one money maker.

And simply giving away free organic visits doesn’t help their cause.

With that in mind, you need to have a combination of both organic and paid posts on social media to find the most success in your marketing plan.

Paid social advertising

All social platforms have their own forms of paid advertising. From Instagram to Facebook to Twitter, you can sponsor posts and even create powerful custom audiences.

On Facebook, advertising works in the display format. Here’s an example of an ad that I’ve run on Facebook:

These ads show up directly in the news feed of customers you are targeting.

Facebook has some of the best audience targeting options in the market. You can effectively target audiences by income, interests, job positions, and just about anything you can think of.

Here are a few articles to get you going with Facebook advertising:

• Facebook Advertising Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Beginner’s Guide to Running Facebook Ads That Convert

On Twitter, running ads is a great way to boost your posts. I love running Twitter-based ads that boost my latest blog posts to get more traffic.

One of my favorite examples of a powerful Twitter Ad comes from Simply Measured:

Using their content, they boost their posts to create ads for relevant, targeted audiences.

This allows them to reach a larger audience than their own following, bringing in more traffic, leads, and followers.

To get started on Twitter with advertising, I recommend reading this resource:

• Start to Finish Guide – Using Twitter Ads to Generate Sales for Your Business

Lastly, LinkedIn is one of my favorite places to advertise and promote content. LinkedIn not only offers successful organic posting, but it also has a user base of high-level users.

It helps you reach people who are otherwise hard to reach, such as c-suite executives.

Content promotion and audience targeting are the keys to LinkedIn. Currently, the best ad I’ve seen on LinkedIn comes from IR:

They use LinkedIn’s lead generation ads to drive email sign-ups with compelling content. LinkedIn, just like Facebook, has diverse audience targeting options and ad options.

Get started today by following this tutorial:

• Start to Finish Guide: How to Use LinkedIn Ads to Generate Sales

Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is exactly what the name suggests. You pay for each click that you receive on an ad that you create.

Sounds similar to search engine marketing, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. But, while SEM is only one type of PPC advertising (and a very special one), many platforms offer to show your ads to their audiences with PPC, too.

Twitter does it, LinkedIn does it, YouTube does it, and a couple of years ago, Instagram introduced ads as well.

But, by far, the most popular platforms for PPC advertising are Google AdWords and Facebook.

On Facebook, you create an ad that looks just like a Facebook status update.

Then, you can pick a specific audience. For example, you could target women in Austin, Texas between the ages of 32 and 45 who like Jon Bon Jovi. Yes, it’s that specific.

Last, you set a budget based on how much you’re willing to pay per click.

Facebook will then serve your ad to your audience in their Facebook news feeds on their desktop computers or their mobile phones.

You can also place ads in the sidebar.

When people click on your ad, Facebook will redirect them to your page, which can be part of your Facebook fan page or any URL you define.

This way, you can get people to buy your product, read your content, or, as in this example, sign up for a free webinar. Grant knows how to run Facebook Ads:

What’s good about PPC is that it integrates seamlessly into the flow of its respective social media platform.

Ever since marketers first started advertising heavily, consumers tried to avoid it.

Why?

Because in 99% of all cases, it’s not relevant to them.

What college kid needs to see a billboard about adult diapers? None!

With PPC, marketers can be sneakier. And we need to be.

The ads show up as part of the natural “just scrolling through my Facebook feed” process and are much less obvious.

Plus, thanks to the specific targeting, you can now make sure that relevant potential customers actually see your ads.

A prime online resource is AdEspresso. They offer software that layers on top of Facebook’s fairly complicated ad manager.

But, the blog is where they hide the good stuff. They have a guide to Facebook Ads for beginners, and it’s a great starting point.

Here are some other good articles and resources to help you start your first Facebook Ad campaign:

• What I Learned Spending $3 Million on Facebook Ads
• How to Create Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Facebook
• Beginner’s Guide to Running Facebook Ads That Convert

Everything that you need to know about Google AdWords

In pay per click (PPC) advertising, Google AdWords is the most popular platform to conduct business on.

The net digital ad revenues of Google AdWords were nearly $30 billion in 2016, and they’re on track to grow to $45 billion in 2019.

Second to Google AdWords is Facebook, but they are still behind by a large margin.

So, why does Google AdWords dominate the PPC space? It’s simply because Google is, by far, the most popular search engine in the world:

Nothing else even comes close to the power and user base of Google.

That means that everyone wants to advertise on Google to capture these billions of users daily.

Advertising on other search networks can be great, but the user bases are much smaller, making it harder to reach your target market.

With that in mind, Google AdWords is one of the best places (if not the best place) to focus your PPC strategy on.

How does it work?

Google AdWords operates on a bidding-based system. For example, on the search network, you bid on different keywords against multiple other advertisers who are looking to rank first.

Keywords can cost anywhere from ~$1 to $500+ depending on your industry. Keywords will cost whatever advertisers are willing to pay for them.

For example, a keyword for a law firm might cost $100 per click because their end profit from a single case could be thousands of dollars. That means that they are willing to bid that high because their profits can justify it.

On the other hand, cheaper products will result in cheaper costs per click.

So, where can you advertise?

Google AdWords is made up of multiple different advertising options. Here I will detail them for you and explain what works best for most businesses:

Search network  

The AdWords search network allows all advertisers to produce text-based ads targeting a specific keyword to show up in search results. For example, when you see results at the top of a search result marked “Ad,” that’s the search network:

The search network is one of the most powerful PPC advertising platforms the world has ever seen.

Why? It’s due to one single factor:

User intent.

Think about it this way:

On Facebook, people aren’t browsing their news feeds to see ads, right? They are on Facebook to engage with their friends and family and maybe to see some news on the side.

But the goal of it isn’t to find products or services. It’s social media. It’s about interaction.

But the search network on AdWords is a whole different animal. People are literally searching for things based on specific keywords to find solutions.

For example, think about a search for “plumber near me.” What does that keyword signify?

That user is trying to find plumbing services ASAP.

That’s intent to buy directly from a single search. Where platforms like Facebook can take multiple ads and remarketing campaigns to convert a prospect, the search network can convert someone from a single keyword search.

It’s one of the main reasons why people love advertising on Google’s search network.

Display network

The display network is another powerhouse of advertising that Google offers to every advertiser on their platform.

The display network taps into Google-approved sites, allowing advertisers to show image-based advertisements on related sites by topic and keyword context.

For example, ads like these are from the display network:

These ads will show up on related sites or sites that you frequently browse that use AdSense.

AdSense is sort of the reverse of the display network. Rather than spending money to display ads on Google, AdSense allows publishers (sites) to make money by displaying ads on their sites.

To clear it up:

Display advertising is PPC advertising where you create image-based ads and pay for each click.

AdSense is the opposite end where websites can allow Google to show those display ads on their sites to make money.

Here is an example of display ads at work:

They’re often sitting above the website or on the sides of the web page, and they’re a great way to capture new users.

On top of that, the display network offers another powerful feature:

Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of bringing back users who have previously engaged with your company.

If you have remarketing enabled, you could use ads to target users who landed on your website but didn’t convert.

This allows you to bring those users back for a second or third or fourth shot at buying from you.

And you need remarketing because about 96% of your visitors aren’t yet ready to buy from you.

One of my favorite examples of a powerful remarketing ad on the display network is from Blue Corona:

Visiting their website and exploring their services leads them to target me with a few different ads about SEO.

It helps reinforce their brand and hopefully get me to click back to their site and convert me this time around.

The Google AdWords display network is great for remarketing, and anyone can set it up.

Google AdWords is the largest and one of the best PPC networks you can use.

Do you want to get started on it today? Here are a few key resources for you:

• Google AdWords Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Google AdWords
• I Increased Sales When I Made this One Google AdWords Change
• Unbelievably Devastating Mistakes People Make with Google Adwords

Read those posts, and you will be on your way to dominating Google AdWords and driving sales like you’ve never imagined.

Affiliate marketing

You can’t spell affiliate marketing without Pat Flynn. Well, you actually can, but you shouldn’t learn it without him.

When Pat created Smart Passive Income in 2008, he was just starting to get familiar with selling informational products online. His first product was Green Exam Academy. It’s a course that he created to help people pass the LEEDs exam for architects, and it sold well.

He wanted to learn more about the concept of passive income, which is where you earn money without actively working for it (after an insane amount of work up-front, of course).

Given his most recent income report, let’s just say he managed to learn quite a bit:

Affiliate marketing is his single biggest source of income.

But, what exactly is affiliate marketing?

Imagine that you know a great pizza place. You know the owner, Luigi, and you go there all the time.

Naturally, you tell your friends about it.

When your friend Tim goes to the pizza place, he mentions that you told him about the pizza parlor and proceeds to buy four pizzas for his friends.

The next time you come back, Luigi says, “Dude, your friend bought four pizzas because of you, and that’s the biggest order I had all week! Thanks, man! Here’s $5 for referring him.”

Ka-ching!

You’ve just made your first affiliate marketing sale.

Except, it doesn’t usually happen in real life like this, especially because a pizza place whose biggest order in a week is four pizzas won’t be around for very long.

But luckily for you, there’s a place where it happens all the time: Online.

Amazon is a prime example (pun intended).

When you sign up for their affiliate program, you can generate a special link for every single product page that they have.

You can then put that link on your blog, for example, or send it to friends who you want to recommend that product to. If they click your link and buy the product, you’ll get a small commission from Amazon for referring that customer.

Over the last seven years, Pat has built the best resource online about affiliate marketing. Some great starting points are:

• Welcome to Smart Passive Income
• 3 Types of Affiliate Marketing Explained—and The One I Profit From
• 8 Principles for Effective Affiliate Marketing on a Blog

How to get paid in affiliate marketing

Now that you have a basic understanding of how affiliate marketing works, how do you get paid?

As I explained in the pizza example, you usually get paid every time your referral leads to a sale.

One of the most popular ways to drive affiliate sales and get paid is by blogging or creating content around those products.

NerdWallet is a great example of a business that thrives off of affiliate marketing:

They focus on personal finance, so they review different credit cards and help users find the best cards for their businesses or lifestyles.

But here’s the kicker: they make money every time someone signs up for a credit card using their site.

For example, if someone clicks on “Chase Freedom” card and signs up, NerdWallet gets a portion of the revenue for their efforts.

Do you want to take your affiliate marketing to the next level? Follow this guide to add affiliate marketing to your online marketing game plan today:

• Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Email marketing

I want to introduce you to your new best friend when it comes to learning email marketing.

Meet Bryan Harris, founder of Videofruit.

Think about those days where you keep complaining all day long until you see your best friend and she immediately says, “Shut up, stop complaining, and do this instead!”

That friend is Bryan.

In the past two years, he bootstrapped his blog from $0 to a six-figure business. His latest course made a cool $220,750.

Originally providing freelance work for big brands like HubSpot and our very own Kissmetrics, he eventually started focusing more on teaching.

He says that the single greatest asset in his business is his email list.

In 2014, he grew his own list from 0 subscribers to over 10,000. By now, he has more than doubled that number.

Lots of articles online show you “how to write better emails” or “how to pitch anything.”  But, before you can send those emails, you first need the list of people to send them to.

That’s what email marketing is all about: Directly communicating with your audience and customers.

Email trumps lots of social media platforms when it comes to engagement. In fact, you’re 40 times more likely to gain a new customer through email than through Facebook or Twitter.

Plus, email is a good, long-term method of contacting prospects.

Think back to the last time you changed your phone number. It probably wasn’t that long ago, right?

Now, do you remember the last time that you changed your email? You probably don’t.

Changing your email is an absolute pain, so people rarely change them. That makes an email address a valuable piece of contact information to have.

Bryan is not the only one who escaped from the cubicle by building an email list, but he’s the best when it comes to teaching you how to do so.

He has a full-fledged course called “Get 10,000 Subscribers.” But for starters, check out these three posts:

• How we started an email list from scratch and got 205 subscribers in 48 hours
• Download 11 Killer Lead Magnet Ideas & Templates
• How to use a giveaway to get 2,239 email subscribers in 10 days

2018 email marketing trends

Email marketing has evolved over time, but it continues to be one of the efforts that yields the highest ROI for online marketing.

Email marketing is critical for any business to develop loyal customers and drive sales without spending a dime on advertising.

The current outlook on email marketing in 2018 trends on two specific topics:

1. Personalization
2. Segmentation

Personalization is one of the biggest factors for a successful email marketing campaign.

For example, check out this amazing, personalized email from JetBlue:

You need to personalize emails in the modern day. That means everything from using the customer’s name to referencing their history or interests.

Personalized emails deliver much higher open and conversion rates when you compare them to boring, templated emails:

Writing better, personalized emails is a great way to boost your online marketing efforts.

Here’s a guide I recently wrote about personalization tips. Use these in your next email campaign to see open rates increase dramatically:

• 8 Email Personalization Techniques That Work Better Than The Name Game

A second popular trend for 2018 in the email marketing sector is segmentation. According to the latest data, segmentation can increase revenue from campaigns by 760%.

So, what exactly is segmentation?

Segmentation focuses on splitting up your customer email list into specific groups, allowing you to target them with much more specific content.

For example, let’s say that you have customers who have purchased basketball shoes and customers who have purchased soccer shoes.

Sending a generic email about a coupon likely won’t generate sales. But splitting those groups into two email lists and sending specific basketball and soccer shoe coupons will skyrocket engagement.

For example, look at this email from Bryan Harris who was looking to validate his online course. To do this, he segmented his email list for users who downloaded content that was similar to his online course:

This customized, segmented email blast generated a 72% reply rate.

Making email marketing as specific as possible is going to help you drive better open rates, response rates, and conversions.

Do you want to learn more? Here’s How to Use Email Segmentation to Increase Your Conversion Rate.

The best email marketing tools

No good email marketing campaign is complete without a proper set of tools.

Sending emails directly from your client, like Gmail, severely limits your ability to both scale and customize.

Sure, it allows you to build lists, but it doesn’t offer personalization tools or ways to schedule out emails and drip campaigns.

A good email marketing tool can help you automate your efforts and consolidate your tools into one, saving time and money while improving productivity.

The most popular email marketing tool on the planet right now is MailChimp.

Their drag-and-drop builder allows you to create stunning email templates for any type of business.

You can do everything from scheduling email campaigns to automating, segmenting, and personalizing them, and more.

It’s safe to say that MailChimp is a one-stop-shop email marketing tool that can help your business save time.

Other amazing email marketing tools include Constant Contact, Drip, ConvertKit, AWeber, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign.

Start with drip campaigns

Drip email campaigns are the bread and butter of a successful email marketing gameplan.

Drip campaigns are simply automated email campaigns that send follow-up emails to users who don’t respond.

For example, if a user doesn’t respond to email #1 about your offer, you can re-engage them with a second, automated email in two days to remind them.

Similar to remarketing, they offer another chance for a user to convert.

One of my favorite examples of a drip campaign comes from Kapost. Here is the first email in their sequence:

Later down the line, when the prospect isn’t responding, Kapost taps into personalization to re-engage the user:

By referencing their interest in Kapost’s content, they are showing a deep level of understanding for the customer.

Drip campaigns should be a big part of your online email marketing efforts.

Get started creating a powerful drip campaign today with this Quick Sprout guide:

• How to Create an Actionable Drip Campaign

Conclusion

Online marketing is the real deal. Of course, guys like Chandler are the exception. But thanks to the power of the Internet, anyone and everyone can become financially independent through Internet marketing.

You can ditch the boss, the nine to five, and the fear of losing your job.

But, that’s easy to say. It’s far harder to do. If you do anything right, it’s hard.

Online marketing is no different. To get ahead, you need to get started.

I hope this guide will help you do just that.

What’s your favorite type of online marketing? Are you building a business with it? Which type of marketing will you learn next? Let me know in the comments!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is the practice of digital channels to spread your message about your products or services. Some of the ways you can do this are through paid ads, social media, emails, blogging or even SEO.

What does an online marketer do?

An online marketer drives traffic a website in order to help a company generate more leads or sales. This can be done through a variety of channels, such as emails, paid ads, SEO, social media, or even content marketing.

How do you learn online marketing?

The easiest way to learn online marketing is to setup your own site, such as a WordPress blog, and then practice writing content and promoting it. From there you can get into more advanced forms of online marketing.

Is online marketing expensive?

With online marketing you can either go after free traffic sources or paid traffic sources. With free ones, you just have to put in time. With paid ones, they cost a fee. You can typically optimize your site to make paid sources profitable.

The post Online Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

InVision Studio aims to cover all bases and be the only UI tool you’ll need. It comes with a bucketload of features to help you create beautiful interactive interfaces, including tools for rapid prototyping, responsive and collaborative design, and working with design systems.

If you’re already using InVision with tools like Sketch, there’s quite a bit of crossover in features. However, Studio’s power lies in the prototyping department, especially if your design involves animation. Rapid prototyping will allow you to create complex and imaginative transitions, enabling you to really achieve the level of animation you desire. Simply figure out how you want to your UI to look at the start of its transition, and then design the end result. InVision Studio works the rest out for you.

On top of that, you can create these custom animations and transitions from a number of gestures and interactions like swiping, clicking, and hovering.

When you’re all done, export your prototypes through InVision and invite people to collaborate. You can view your project on its intended platform – a great way to explore and test your design. Clients will then be able to comment right onto the design.

To top that, you can stop thinking about creating numerous artboards for multiple devices – Studio’s layout engine will adjust your design to any screen automatically. This timesaver gives you space to think so much more about your design.

02. Sketch

Bohemian Coding’s Sketch is one of the most widely-used web design platforms; it’s a highly powerful vector-based tool for building interfaces and prototypes in a collaborative way. Sketch was built especially for making websites and apps so there are no unnecessary features cluttering your interface and it’s faster and more efficient than software that has a broader scope. 

Rory Berry, creative director at Superrb, made the switch to Sketch in 2017, and highly recommends it. “Compared to Photoshop, sorting all your documents and making revisions on Sketch is much easier,” he begins. “Sketch has small documents whereas Photoshop has large ones. Due to it being a vector-based app, the file sizes are dramatically smaller compared to Photoshop.”

And that’s not all. “The built-in grid system in Sketch is great and makes interface design much easier. I think the overall UI and minimal feel makes it much cleaner to design in and user friendly. Photoshop seems very complicated in comparison.”

The community offers hundreds of Sketch plugins to make your design workflow easier and smoother. 

The downside of Sketch is that it’s only available on Mac, and there are no plans to support other operating systems. This has been a problem, as designers will often want to share .sketch files with developers using Windows. Fortunately there is now a “Sketch for Windows” application called Lunacy that will open and edit .sketch files and eliminate most of this pain – read about it in the Exporting and Converting section of this article. 

Don’t miss our top tips for using Sketch.

03. Adobe XD

Adobe XD offers the best environment for digital projects under the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. If you’re a keen Adobe user and new to XD, you may not find the interface very ‘Adobe’-like to begin with. However, it does stack up to the other leading tools out there. It is a jump if you’ve been designing in Photoshop for a while, too, but very worth it for UI design.

This vector design and wireframing tool keeps getting better, with additions such as support for voice prototyping ensuring the tool can keep up with the latest trends in UX. XD includes drawing tools, tools that enable you to define non-static interactions, mobile and desktop previews, and sharing tools for giving feedback on designs. It allows you to select a device-specific artboard size for starting a project, and you can even import a popular UI kit, for example Google’s Material Design. 

Crucially, Adobe XD integrates with the rest of Creative Cloud, which means you’ll be able to import and work with assets from Photoshop or Illustrator easily. If you already use other Adobe apps, the UI will feel nice and familiar and shouldn’t present too much of a learning curve.

Andrei Robu, design director at Robu Studio in Barcelona, is among its fans. “For quick mockups it’s great,” he says. “It’s a very light interface, with lots of photos loaded in, and great for moodboards. The prototyping is very useful to show clients how stuff works, especially because you can push the content online right away.”

Ellis Rogers, graphic designer at Receptional Ltd also recommends it. “When the design/prototype or wireframe is complete, Adobe XD allows you to very quickly select elements and create page transitions for a working prototype, which can be shared via a link,” he explains. “The link also allows you to gather feedback per page, keeping it all organised. The link can be updated within Adobe XD so the client can always see the latest version without having to worry about incorrect versions. It’s an absolute joy to work with.”

04. Marvel

Marvel is another web design tool that’s great for producing quick ideas, refining an interface to how you want it to look, and building prototypes. Marvel offers a really neat way of building pages, allowing you to simulate your design through a prototype. There are some wonderful integrations for inserting your designs into your project workflow. Interestingly, there’s an integrated user testing feature, which is still fairly unusual in the web design toolscape. It’s all online too, so no need to download anything.

05. Figma

Figma is an interface design tool that enables multiple designers to collaborate in real-time. This is very effective when you have multiple stakeholders in the project that are involved in shaping the outcome. It’s available in the browser, or on Windows, Mac or Linux, and there are both free and paid versions depending on what you use it for.

Here are some of its outstanding features:

“Figma has a similar USP as Sketch, with the exception of being cross-platform,” explains frontend designer Benjamin Read. “When I used it to create a couple of icons I found the workflow incredibly smooth. It took me no time to learn and had the added benefit of being collaborative: you can share graphics with others within the app.”

“I’ve been trying to switch to Linux for my work and sometimes we use Windows, so Figma makes sense to me from a practical standpoint,” he adds.

Freelance content writer and artworker David Eastwood also has good things to say about Figma. “It’s also been a really useful tool when we’ve needed to quickly mock MVTs; sometimes small additions to an existing layout. We love that you can quickly create designs for desktop, tablet and mobile.”

06. Affinity Designer

“Serif’s Affinity Designer has been dubbed the ‘Photoshop killer’ by some, and it’s easy to see why,” says product designer Dan Edwards. “There were a few features I really enjoyed, including adjustable, nondestructive layers. This essentially means you can adjust images or vectors without damaging them.

“The 1,000,000 per cent zoom was just bliss; it’s especially useful when working with vector art, as you can really get in close. The undo and history features are also really handy: Affinity allows you to go back over 8,000 steps!”

“When it comes to designing, the UI feels familiar. When moving from Photoshop, everyone seems to want to start over, which can pose a real challenge. What Affinity has done is to keep the layout familiar, while tightening everything up and hiding distractions. I was easily able to jump straight in and get designing.”

Affinity Designer is also available for the iPad. And note that this is not the scaled-down mobile app version you might expect: it’s the same full version you get on the desktop.

Don’t miss our guides to using the Pixel persona, the Export persona and the Pen tool in Affinity Designer. Also note that Serif also makes a Photoshop alternative, Affinity Photo and an InDesign alternative, Affinity Publisher; all of which play together nicely.

MOCKUPS AND PROTOTYPES

07. UXPin

The next web design tool in our list is UXPin. This dedicated prototyping app is available for Mac, Windows, or in the browser. With most other design tools you can only mimic interactions by linking different elements on your artboard, UXPin gets closer to the code and enables you to work with interactive states, logic, and code components. 

There are integrated element libraries for iOS, Material Design and Bootstrap, plus hundreds of free icon sets, to help you on your way. UXPin has also recently introduced accessibility features to ensure your designs stay in line with WCAG standards, which we applaud. 

API Request is the latest addition to UXPin’s Interactions capabilities. The feature enables you to prototype app that ‘talk’ to your products from directly within your design tool – with no need for code. It works by enabling you to send HTTP requests to an external API.

You can create your first prototype in UXPin for free, and if it suits you switch to a paid monthly subscription (team memberships are available). UXPin recently improved its integration with Sketch, so it could be one to introduce into your workflow if you’re a Sketch fan that finds its prototyping capabilities limiting. 

08. Proto.io

Proto.io is a top application that allows for the inception of lifelike prototypes that begin with rough ideas and end with fully fledged designs. The tool also provides you with a range of possibilities for your projects, including detailed and custom vector animations.

You can start by developing initial ideas with a hand-drawn style, work them into wireframes, and finish them off with a high-fidelity prototype. The Sketch and Photoshop plugins help if you want to design using other tools, but Proto.io handles the end-to-end design process well. Other features – user-testing, for example – will help validate your designs. This is an all-in-one solution with a great number of trusted brands already using it.

There are a bunch of great demos to start playing with, and you can really see just how easily this end-to-end solution could replace a number of tools currently in place. Relatively recent additions, Proto.io has recently included an expanse of new features – including assets managers, developer guides, and the ability to record your prototype – bring this tool in line with many of the better prototyping tools.

09. Balsamiq

If rapid, efficient wireframing is what you’re looking for then Balsamiq is a strong suggestion. You can quickly develop a structure and layouts for your projects with ease. Drag-and-drop elements make life easier, and you can link buttons to other pages. By wireframing, you can quickly start to plan your interfaces and share them with your team or clients. Balsamiq has been going since 2008 and prides itself on its low-fidelity, fast, focused no-nonsense approach. 

10. ProtoPie

Web design tool ProtoPie allows you to create complex interactions and get close to your design’s ideal end function. Perhaps the standout feature is the ability to control the sensors of smart devices in your prototype, such as tilt, sound, compass and 3D Touch sensors. Depending on your project, this is a great tool for those that want to encompass native app features. It’s easy as pie and no code is required.

Recently released version 4.2 contains two new highly requested features: now you can add editable SVGs to your scenes, and find the distance between two layers instantly upon selection.

11. MockFlow

MockFlow is a suite of applications for wireframing and planning websites. WireframePro helps you to set out your initial idea and then iterate until it’s just right – there’s a UI revision tracker to help you with this. It comes with thousands of pre-built components and layouts that you can adjust to meet your requirements, and there’s a preview mode for presenting your work to colleagues and clients. 

Once you’ve done your wireframes, the rest of the suite can help you with other aspects of planning your website including information architecture, making a style guide (this can be generated automatically), and working through a sign-off process.

If you’d like to see some other options, check out our roundup of top wireframe tools.

12. Adobe Comp

Adobe Comp is a fantastic web design tool for the iPad that assists in the creation of wireframes, prototypes and layout concepts for web pages. A Creative Cloud-powered intelligent sketchpad, if you like. It has basic templates for a number of layouts for mobile and web, and even print if that’s your thing, and you can create quick placeholders by drawing intuitive shapes to represent images, text and more. Comp converts rough outlines into straight lines, circles and rectangles. 

Bewilderingly, Adobe has not seen fit to include direct export to XD – crazy! – despite a long-standing request that has been under review for what seems like forever. However, exporting to Photoshop is built-in (along with Illustrator and InDesign), and once tweaks to your mockup are made in the ubiquitous image editor you can then export from there to XD. Despite this unwelcome extra step in the Adobe devotee wireframer’s user journey, Comp fully deserves its inclusion in this list with its go-anywhere capabilities, ease-of-use, and impressive UI.

13. Flinto

Flinto is a design tool that allows you to create unique interactions within your designs. You can utilise a number of gestures, and make easy transitions by designing the before and after states. Flinto simply works out the differences and animates for you – super helpful. 

Bear in mind that this is iOS only, but it will feel familiar when you start using it. There’s documentation online to help you on your way, and importing from Sketch and Figma is straightforward too.

14. Axure

Axure has always been one of the best wireframing tools on the market, great for complex projects that require dynamic data. With Axure, you can really focus on mocking up projects that are both technical and require key attention on structure and data.

Axure’s hand-off process includes the creation of thorough specifications that help developers to create a final product that matches your designs.

15. Justinmind

Justinmind will help with prototyping, and integrates with other tools like Sketch and Photoshop. You can choose your interactions and gestures to help assemble your prototype. It also contains UI kits, so you can put together screens quickly, and it’s responsive, too.

16. Fluid

Fluid is a simple and intuitive tool for building rapid prototypes and working up designs. It packs some nice out-of-the-box assets to get you going with rapid prototypes. Once you’ve upgraded, it’s really easy to assemble your own symbols with your own preferred UI assets. This tool offers very fast UI design, with assets available for both high and low fidelity prototypes.

17. Interplay

Interplay is a prototyping system that improves communication and collaboration on your team, especially between designers and developers. It is built with design systems in mind, and integrates with your code to generate documentation that is easy to follow and updates automatically. Keeping everyone on the same page and up to date is a core function – so when your code updates, so does your design. Interplay is still in beta, but already works with a number of the big design and development tools.

DESIGN FRAMEWORKS AND LIBRARIES

18. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is certainly not a new tool, but it has revolutionised development and continues to shape how we build stuff on the web. 

At time of writing, the latest version (4.4.1, launched November 2019) introduced new responsive containers that are fluid up to a certain breakpoint, and new responsive .row-cols classes for specifying the number of columns across breakpoints efficiently. 

Bootstrap has also recently launched its own open source icon library, Bootstrap Icons, that is designed to work with Bootstrap components. 

Find the best free Bootstrap themes in our guide.

19. Startup 3

If you like Bootstrap but don’t want to dive into the raw thing, Startup 3 is the easy way; it’s an online app with built-in templates and themes for building websites based on Bootstrap 4 with a 12-column grid. You can build your site without writing code using the drag-and-drop interface, but you will need some knowledge of HTML and CSS to finish things up.

20. Vue.js

Vue.js is a framework for building user interfaces, and uses a virtual DOM. As the name suggests, Vue’s core library is focused on the view layer.

Look at a code example, taken from Vue’s docs, that utilises user input and demonstrates the library’s elegance. We’ll start with the HTML:

<div id="example">
 <p>{{ message }}</p>
 <button
v-on:click="reverseMessage">Reverse
Message</button>
</div>

Notice the custom v-on handler that calls the reverseMessage method. Here’s the JavaScript:

var myApp = new Vue({
 el: '#example',
 data: {
  message: 'Hello Vue.js!'
 },
 methods: {
  reverseMessage: function () {
   this.message = this.message.split('').
reverse().join('')
  }
 }
});

This example populated the paragraph with data and defines the reverseMessage method. Vue is great for those less experienced with complex libraries, but also has a number of plugins to help with development of complex single-page web apps.

21. Pattern Lab

Pattern Lab is a beautiful pattern-driven design tool created by Dave OIsen and Brad Frost. It’s based on the concept of Atomic Design, which says that you should break your design down into its smallest parts – atoms – and combine them to form bigger, reusable components – molecules and organisms – that can then be turned into usable templates.

Although at its core it’s a static site generator that stitches together UI components, there’s much more to Pattern Lab than that. It’s language-and tool-agnostic; it enables you to nest UI patterns inside each other and design with dynamic data; it features device-agnostic viewport resizing tools to help you ensure your design system is fully responsive; and it’s fully extensible so you can be sure it’ll expand to meet your needs.

22. Material Design

Material Design is a visual language from Google that aims to combine the classic principles of good design with innovations in technology and science to create a cohesive and flexible foundation your website. 

Websites and apps created using the Material Design framework will look modern and be familiar to the user, so people will find it easy to use your product right away. There are many tools available to help with this design system; click Resources on the nav bar to find them. 

Join us in April 2020 with our lineup of JavaScript superstars at GenerateJS – the conference helping you build better JavaScript. Book now at generateconf.com

Next page: Specialised web design tools to address any problem

The post 52 web design tools to help you work smarter in 2020 appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

Like any profession, there are tools and resources available to make your life as web designer easier. The more useful and time-saving your tools, the more time you can focus on important tasks such as coding and designing. As for me personally, any tools I come across that help me do my job quicker, better and more efficiently, I certainly save and refer back to. Here is a collection of 15 useful online tools and websites for web designers that I frequently use.

1. Adobe Color CC

Have a color you know you will be using in your web design project, maybe a color in the logo, but don’t know where to go from there in regards to creating the perfect color scheme for your project? Then Adobe Color CC is exactly the tool you are looking for. Adobe Color CC allows you to create and save various color schemes. Simply plugin a hex color code (for example, #0babc4) and then choose whether you would like the color scheme to be analogous, monochromatic, complementary, compound, etc etc. Extremely easy and useful.

2. Google Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. Its rapid debugging feature will help direct you to errors within your code, saving you tons of time when trying to figure out the location of a coding error. Another incredible feature is its ability to make quick style changes. Curious to see what a paragraph will look like in a different font? Wondering if you should add more padding to a module? Chrome DevTools makes it super fast and easy to see how these style changes will look. This tool is a must-have for anyone working in web development.

3. What’s My Browser Size

As straightforward as it sounds, this Web app shows you the current size of your browser window. This can be useful in designing responsive websites.

4. Color by Hailpixel

Color by Hailpixel is the perfect tool for finding and exploring color combinations and color tones. Simply hover your mouse across your screen in order to see and admire the never-ending variations of colors. As soon as you come across the color you like, click on it and continue searching for the next color. The app provides you with all the hex color codes you selected, which is very convenient.

5. Brusheezy

Brusheezy is the go-to place for Photoshop resources. There you will find an infinite array of Photoshop brushes, patterns, textures, PSDs and much much more – basically anything and everything Photoshop-related. All of the resources on Brusheezy are free to download and, depending on the license, free to use in your projects.

6. Google Fonts

There are many font websites on the Web, but most of them you need to pay for the rights to use the fonts for commercial use. The wonderful thing about Google Fonts is that their entire catalog of fonts is free and open source, accessible to anyone for any project, both personal and commercial.

7. Unsplash

Unsplash offers free high-resolution stock images that you can use in your web design projects. What’s great is that all the photos on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, meaning you can copy, modify, distribute and use them for free (including for commercial purposes), without having to ask permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.

8. Pixabay

Like Unsplash, Pixabay is another great website and resource for free-to-use stock imagery for your web design projects.

9. Iconfinder

Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, Iconfinder works with a community of local and international icon designers. They are continuously expanding and adding to their very large collection of icons available for download. Some of their icons are free to use without permission, others are free to use with attribution to the author, and others are for sale, but for very reasonable prices (usually $1 or $2).

10. Favicon.cc

Favicon.cc is very convenient for it allows to you create a favicon from scratch using their online app, or by uploading an image of your own and transforming it into a favicon. Compared to other favicon generators, I find favicon.cc to be one of the best for the simple fact that it’s easy to use and the quality of the favicon is high (and not super-grainy like the favicons created by other favicon generators on the Web).

11. Font Identifier

Did you find an image with a beautiful font, but can’t figure out which font it is? Simply upload the image to Font Squirrel’s Font Identifier and their app will tell you the name of the font. Very easy and convenient.

12. Freepik

Freepik is a great source for illustrations and graphic design. I have personally used to it to create very beautiful and detailed infographics. What’s great about Freepik is that the content can be used in both personal and commercial projects (with a link to Freepik).

13. LastPass

Remembering your own passwords is difficult enough, try remembering the passwords of all your clients’ websites. Mission impossible! For this I use a free app called LastPass. It is a password management tool that makes it very easy to save and manage your passwords. What’s great is that LastPass is cloud-based, so you can log in and a retrieve your passwords from wherever, whenever.

14. Awwwards​

Need a little inspiration for your next project? Awwwards is a showcase of award-winning websites from the around the world. You can browse websites by award won (nominees, sites of the years, etc), by category (architecture, blog, ecommerce, fashion, etc), by color, and even by country.

15. Dribbble

Another great source for inspiration, Dribbble is a community of designers that share with each other, other fellow designers, what they are working on. The community consists of web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, logo designers, icon artists, typographers, and other creatives which share screenshots of whatever project(s) they’re working on, making it a great destination for attaining new ideas for your projects.

The post 15 Useful Tools & Websites for Web Designers appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

Marketing is booming and you can make a killing as a professional as a marketer. But if you’re trying to learn marketing by just Googling stuff, things are going to be very confusing. You’ll get conflicting advice from different websites and you’re just going to be like, “Oh my God, I’m going to give up.” So today I’m going to break down the best free resources for you to learn marketing so you can hit the ground running and jumpstart your marketing career.

Digital Marketing Courses | RESOURCES & LINKS:

01. Social Media 101 course by Constant Contact
https://blogs.constantcontact.com/social-media-quickstarter/

02. HubSpot Academy
https://academy.hubspot.com/

03. Google Skillshop
https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/

04. SEMrush Academy
https://www.semrush.com/academy/

05. Facebook Blueprint
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn

06. Internet Marketing for Smart People
https://copyblogger.com/imfsp/

07. How to Learn SEO
https://youtu.be/4za8NvwYr80

For further information, Contact me

The post FREE Resources to Learn Marketing | Digital Marketing Courses and Certification appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

Here are five quick tips for building your brand, attracting more customers, and keeping them coming back for more.

Upgraded plans start at just $4.00 per month and give you instant access to a custom domain, expertly-designed themes, the ability to remove ads, and built-in security and backup features.

Check out our plans and see which one is right for you.Upgrade now

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Using an online ‘website builder’ package maybe tempting for cost conscious businesses startups, but there are many reasons why this option is a bad idea.  Website development requires behind the scenes coding and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)  that requires understanding of coding and internet processes.  If you think of a website like a car, the ‘engine’ is the backend coding and SEO.  Nobody really sees this, but it is essential for your website to work and rank well with search engines like Google.  If your self build website fails to show up in searches, you are just throwing money down the drain.

Below is a list of eleven reasons why you should not build your own website.

1: Customisation
Do It Yourself website builders offer a degree of customisation, but there are limitations and most basic packages lack functionality, originality and are not interactive. If you wanted to add extra features or functionality you will probably end up paying a significant monthly premium.

2: Efficiency
Website development is technical, and it takes time to build a great website that functions well.  If you’re not a professional web developer, the hours upon hours you spend trying to create a website could be more efficiently spent generating business and growing your client base.  Hiring someone with experience and knowledge to build it, will save you time and money and will ultimately look and perform better.

3: Professionalism
First impressions count.  Your website is the digital manifestation of your business. It’s simple, a website made by an experienced web developer will look professional, function properly and will leave a positive impression on your website visitors.

4: Search Engine Optimisation
Your website needs to be appealing to search engines like Google and Bing. The major search engines do not crawl flash based sites which many DIY site builder are based on.  They also prioritise SEO optimised sites and rank them higher. What is the point of building your own beautiful website if it languishes on page 9 of a Google search and gets no views?

5: Not Google Friendly
With a DIY site builder, Google can’t verify your site in Webmaster Tools.  Unverified sites are demoted in Google search rankings.  Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics integration is key to monitoring the effectiveness of your website, it can be used to monitor site downtime, crawl rates, bounce ratings, load times, broken links and search traffic.  Google has by far the greatest share of internet searches, at around 90% of total traffic. It also offers the best and most current analytics for your website.  Older scripting/tracking technologies, often used by DIY site builders, have inaccurate and sometimes misleading site analytics, which fail to track accurately the real ‘human’ traffic to your website.  If you are spending money on your website and/or on internet marketing you want to be sure your analytics are correct to properly evaluate your ‘Return on Investment’.

6: When It Hits the Fan!
Things can go wrong with websites.  Browser updates can affect the way your website displays; elements of your website can break and stop functioning; hosting issues can result in significant website ‘down time’.  All these things can be a real headache, even for professionals.  Having a website developer on hand can solve all of these issues without you suffering from the stress.

7: Mobile-Unfriendly
Self-built sites are not ‘responsive’ by design.  Modern websites are, and can detect the size of the browser screen and deliver your content in the most appropriate way.   Websites that are not mobile friendly are demoted in Google search results and with more and more people browsing the internet on mobile devices this lack of responsiveness will result in less visitors to your site.

8: Disability Unfriendly
The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), ensures that websites are accessible to blind and disabled users.  If your website is not disability friendly you are breaking the law and Google will also demote you and possibly remove your website from search results.  Website developers ensure that your content is DDA compliant and performs well for disabled and blind visitors.
9: Faster is Not Better
Your website is usually the first point of contact people will have with your business. A quality website, with effective SEO can take several days to build, depending on the size and scope of the project.  You can build a DIY website in about an hour.  Why?  Because it lacks the functionality, SEO and backend coding necessary for your website to be an effective presence on the internet.  There are some things you shouldn’t rush, surgical operations, good food and your businesses website are to name but three.

10: Advertisements & Footer Banners
If your DIY website has their name in your websites footer it is bad news.  It looks unprofessional and makes your business look cheap.  DIY labels can make your operation look ‘tin pot’ and can raise suspicion as to your businesses reliability and trustworthiness amongst website visitors.

11: Experience
An experienced website developer knows they have a vested interest in your success as a business.  If your business does well, and the website performs well, they benefit from continued custom and positive reviews.  Long term mutually beneficial relationships are the key to business success.

If you are a small- to medium-sized business owner looking for a more robust, performative, and custom solution for your web presence, head on over to https://en.zaferhammour.com/ to request a free quote for your next design project.

The post 11 Reasons You Should Not Build Your Own Website appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

Being the CEO of a web design company, a lot of clients ask me why you shouldn’t use Wix to create an affordable website.  When you first check out these DIY website builders, they seem like a pretty good deal. You pay an affordable price every month and get to have your very own website online.

When you start digging deep into these DIY websites, you see that they are not all they are cracked up to be. You end up with a ugly looking website that doesn’t bring in any customers or traffic. So what happened?

Why You Shouldn’t Use Wix

I always tell my clients that building a website is like building a house. It takes a team of people (all with specialty skills) to come together and build it. You need an engineer, designer and structural builders. When you build your website with platforms like Wix, you are trying to build a house all by yourself and it may end up looking decent but it’s going to have a lot of structural issues. Its going to end up costing you more in the end than hiring a professional to get the job done.

Bad User Experience

The biggest reason you should not use Wix to create your website is that you are not a professional web designer. There is a detailed process creating a website including building out user flows, CTAs, prototyping, etc.

When you create a website using a DIY site builder, you are likely not designing it with a good user experience which will diminish your user experience resulting in lost customers and revenue. You will also lose brand recognition and uniqueness because there are a lot of other customers all using the same website templates.

Professional web designers will layout a user flows using objective based designs that are likely to increase engagement and customers. Websites designed by user experience professionals are more likely to engage the visitors and funnel them through a user flow, increasing your conversions and customers.

Speed & Security

One of the most important parts of your website is the speed and security. Having a fast website will increase user engagement and search engine optimization. Wix.com and other DIY site building websites host your website on a shared server with thousands of other users. This diminishes the speed of your own website will results in lost customers and bad user experience.

Having this mean people on a single server is also dangerous security-wise. If someone were to hack one of these servers, it may compromise every customer hosted on that server.

Lack of SEO

Probably the single biggest problem with DIY builder websites like Wix is that they are not SEO-friendly. SEO stands for search engine optimization and its the act or methodology of getting more visitors to your website from search engines (like Google). This includes on-page optimization as well as off-page optimization. Both of these are very necessary and equally important for getting more traffic to your website.

FREE SEO Website Audit

Get more traffic online with this Free SEO Website Analysis.

Wix websites are known to have bad SEO since you are not in full control of your website. To build a website with good on-page SEO, you must have access to the code and be able to constantly monitor your website for potential SEO issues.

DIY Website builders are widely known for having bad SEO because they are generated on fly in a visual type of editor. This creates un-needed code and extra HTML that will hurt your rankings in the search engines. If you are looking to gain traffic, conversions and more customers to your website, think about hiring a pro.

Limited Pages

Often times, DIY site builders only offer limited pages unless you pay more. Wix offers a single page for their lowest website plan. This is just bad in so many different ways. A website should never be only one page. To engage and sell the customer, you must have an authoritative website with more than one single page.

Another con about having limited pages is that your likely to get no visitors to your website. Google and other search others love content… Whether its images or words, the more you have, the more traffic you are likely to get.

Flash Based

Most Wix websites are flash based which is almost a dead technology for creating websites. Flash is terrible for SEO since it does not produce any crawl-able content.. just code. Its also very slow loading and should only be used for animations and games.

Flash based websites created by Wix will be far superior to their non-flash competitors in both usability and search engine rankings.

Website Ads

Upon creating a website with Wix, you will notice that there is a large ad that explains the website was created with WIX. This can dramatically lower your management rate and brand awareness. Customer trust is very important and when you build a cheap site, customers knows. This will create a sense of cheapness in the customers mind because they know you didn’t invest much in your website.

Customers come across these ads and see that you created your website for free. Would you trust a company that has a free website?

Not Unique

Wix currently has over 90 million users and 500 designer-made templates. Now, 500 may sound like a lot of pre-made templates but with over 90 million users these templates are going to get used a lot. That means that even though you may think your website looks pretty good, there are a lot of other people with that exact same template.

If you want to stand out among your competitors, you must have a custom website design that builds confidence in the customer by uniqueness and brand recognition.

Having a non-unique website can hurt you in the search engines as well. Google bots crawl your Wix site and notice its very similar to other websites out there and you will get dinged for this. The key to gaining visitors to your website via Google is having a unique website with unique and engaging content.

Optimization-less

A successful website is always being optimized. You must constantly be looking for ways to increase engagement using A/B testing and user flow testing. When you create a simple Wix website you don’t have the ability or freedom to do any of this. The result is that you will have a static website that is not growing or evolving which can kill your business.

No Migrations

Say you are not happy with your Wix.com service and you would like to cancel. Unfortunately, its almost impossible to move your website anywhere else. So before you sign up and spend countless hours trying to put together a Wix website, remember that you won’t be able to move it anywhere and you are stuck with them.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion there are a plethora of cons when it comes to using Wix to build your own website. You may not see any traffic or visitors and if you do, its likely they will leave because the website has not built enough trust in the company. Customers are smarter these days and they know the different between a pre-made template and a custom designed website. Which business would you rather use? The professional website? Or the do-it-yourself website?

If you are a small- to medium-sized business owner looking for a more robust, performative, and custom solution for your web presence, head on over to https://en.zaferhammour.com/ to request a free quote for your next design project.

The post Why You Shouldn’t Use Wix For Your Website appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

So if Wix makes it easy to build a website why shouldn’t you use it?Wix makes it easy to build a nice website, and very easy to build a bad performing one.CLICK TO TWEET

1.  Wix Makes It ‘Easy’ To Build A Website

So if Wix makes it easy to build a website why is that a negative?  If you approach building a website as an ‘easy’ task then you’ve started off on the wrong foot.  I like to think I know what looks good but if I tried to design a brochure it would look shocking – I’m not a graphic designer and would never pretend to be one, so why should you pretend to be a website developer when your business depends on your website?.

If it was ‘easy’ to build a website that works then there wouldn’t be hundreds of thousands of blog articles about search engine optimisation (SEO), content structures, on and off site reputation management and conversion optimisation.

Personally I think most companies, particularly small to medium ones, do not spend enough time on their website brief.  Quite often it’s because they don’t know what to ask about or the web agencies don’t take the time to ask the right questions.  Business owners shouldn’t necessarily know what questions to ask – your business is your speciality, you should be able to trust your web developer to ask the right questions.

Wix makes it easy to jump right in, throw together a web page and publish it.  Before you do that you need to stop and think, and work out what your business needs for your online presence.

You need to consider how your content is going to be structured, what image sizes you upload, what page titles you will use, the header text for each page, the calls to action that appear in search engine results (SERPs) as well as conversion optimisation.  As well as that you need to ensure you have implemented some online tracking so you know how it’s performing, and set up essential Google tools to get insights from your website that may drive your marketing decisions.

Yes, I’ve seen expensive websites without Google Analytics installed – a fundamental oversight you shouldn’t really get when spending thousands of dollars.  I’ve also had someone call me to make their website more visible.  They spent $100 on their website with some random overseas company.  How much business has that ‘cheap’ website cost them? It probably turns out the website has cost them thousands in lost business – there’s a worked example below.

This is why it shouldn’t be ‘easy’ to build a website.  What looks good doesn’t necessarily perform well.

2. Wix Hides Complexities

Wooooaa!  That’s another benefit I hear you shout!  Hiding complexities in website development is not necessarily a good thing.  Wix makes it easy to design websites like brochures and they’re not.  What you see isn’t what Google sees.  Although Google does take user experience into account it’s mostly around content and mobile friendliness and things like that.  One of the most basic elements Google cares about are how your page titles are structured and what they tell about the page, yet for a few Wix websites I’ve seen, there is no attention paid to this despite Wix supporting SEO settings for pages.

Google doesn’t really care if your button looks nice, or your image is stunning.  The search result below is quite typical when you don’t know what to do.  There’s no call to action in the result, and the description doesn’t say what the page is about.  If this is one of ten similar results I’d probably click on a more enticing one.

By hiding these complexities it makes it very easy to get really proud of your new website and go and shout about it to the world.  You better keep shouting as that may end up being the best way to get your website found as Google may not find it.

You need to be aware of all the trickier bits that make up your web presence like SEO, off site business listings, reviews and more.  A recent chart by specialist company MOZ showed your website only makes up an element of your online presence – there’s backlinks, business listings, citations and your website.  Without all of those you may not get found by your customers, so unfortunately your pretty Wix website will fall short of the mark.

I’ve seen briefs and quotes that don’t reflect the most basic functionality a company needs, and they often treat SEO as an ‘optional extra’.  It is not.  It’s essential and often implementing simple steps will make a huge difference to your visibility.

3.  Wix Hosts Your Website

If your website starts performing slower than normal a decent web host is a good place to start.  If a website is based on one of the open source content management systems like WordPress or Silverstripe there’s a whole bunch of hosting companies wanting your dollar to host your website.  Some are great, and some are bad.

Generally I don’t like the idea of using a proprietary content management system whether its a platform like Wix, or one developed by your agency.  If you fall out with the third party or outgrow them you’ll more than likely need to start again.  Whilst WordPress isn’t the only available platform, I’ve had business owners ask me if it’s a decent option or does it ‘only’ get used by bloggers?  Techcrunch use WordPress and Mashable used to use it – I can safely say their sites are probably bigger that yours.

When you develop your website using Wix you have no place to go – they host your website and you can’t go elsewhere, which brings me to the next point.

4.  You Cannot Migrate Your Wix Data Elsewhere Easily

So you get lucky and your website is performing well and you want to add features to it that aren’t supported within Wix, or want a major overhaul.  Essentially you’ve outgrown your website.

If this happens it is very difficult to move your content away from Wix.  If you had a WordPress based website you can keep all your content and apply another theme, or a customised theme (which is effectively a layout).  Your website looks completely different but you don’t have to re-enter your content.  There is still work to be done when you switch themes as they all have their own way of working, different image sizes in different slots, but you can keep all your content.

If you think you may outgrow Wix, maybe a full web development is outside of your budget right now, but remember to factor in that potential cost in the future.

5.  Wix Isn’t Free – It May Be More Expensive Than You Think

Wix is a very attractive initial platform as the base offering is free.  It’s a very effective sales technique that gets customers in the door.  Mailchimp use a similar technique but even Mailchimp doesn’t allow you access to automated email sequences in their base offering – this is an essential part of email marketing.

With the free plans you have Wix branding on your site, and the little icon shown in the browser bar will be a Wix logo.  You also can’t add in Google Analytics tracking until you get onto a premium plan.

Premium plans start at a mere $4 or so per month so it’s not expensive by any means, and they go up to $24 per month.

When you start adding functionality Wix has an ‘app store’ so you can choose which apps to use.  There’s loads of apps to choose from and many start with a ‘freemium’ offering with more functionality provided at a price so head back to that website brief and factor in what you want into your costs.

The largest cost of using Wix for many people is a hidden one.  It’s the cost of websites built by users who may not know what makes a website really work, therefore it doesn’t get found, or it doesn’t function well.  That lack of functionality is probably costing you business.

I compare this loss of business to a garage owner who had a cheap website built several years ago.  It couldn’t be found.  When a new website and offsite business listings were put live he was inundated with work.  If you imagine he built that website in Wix (like some of his competitors have) without understanding the important elements of search engine visibility, the scenario below is an extremely conservative estimate of the amount of work lost :

• Average workshop job is $200
• One job a week comes through a new website = 52 x 200 = $10400 per year
• Old website was live for 4 years = 4 x 10400 = $41600

That cheap website has cost him $41600 in lost revenue during 4 years.

In the USA, the average car repair cost in 2011 was $305.56, and I can safely assume that more than one job per week is brought in as a result of being found online.  You can then consider the ongoing total customer value with regular servicing, road fitness tests and more, it’s perfectly feasible to think that this cheap website cost him a lot more than the face value.

5 customers per week at $305.56, over 4 years is $317,782.40 in lost revenue due to a bad website, and this is without value added upsells.Using Wix may cost you $317,782.40 in lost revenue. Find out why…CLICK TO TWEET

Summary

It is possible to build a decent revenue generating website using the Wix platform.  The biggest problem with Wix is it makes it easy to create a website that you think is great and it has given a lot of people the perception of having a good website when that’s far from the truth.

Websites are not brochures and they shouldn’t be treated that way.

To bring revenue from a website you need to think of it as an online presence, ticking all the right boxes, and invest time and money to get it right.

Can you afford to lose $317,782.40 in your business?

If you would like independent help with your website brief, or want a health check done on your online presence, get in touch today.

*** UPDATE 25th March 2019 :  ***

I have closed the comments on this post for a couple of reasons.

1: Some of these comments are soooo negative – we can all have views.

2. I’m not a web developer the majority of my time, I’m a digital marketer.

3. Wix may have improved some of the minor details of this post, and as Wix isn’t my market its not in the best interests of my time to update details.

Some of the smaller details of this blog post may have been superceded with Wix developments, but overall my sentiment is still the same as I’ve seen it happen so many times…  If you know what you’re doing for digital marketing, Wix may be a good solution, but if you use it to throw up a basic website without learning a bit about digital marketing basics and SEO you are likely to be putting up a website which may cost you more in lost revenue than the money you saved by not hiring a professional….but everyone has different circumstances and finances.

Thanks to everyone who contributed in balanced manner, apart from the people who were super negative and one sided 😉  All the best with your digital marketing.

If you are a small- to medium-sized business owner looking for a more robust, performative, and custom solution for your web presence, head on over to https://en.zaferhammour.com/ to request a free quote for your next design project.

The post 5 Reasons Not To Use Wix For Your Website – A Brief Wix Review appeared first on Web Designer VIP.

1. Backups – WordPress.com takes care of all backups for you. In their own words:

“ If a very large meteor were to hit all the WordPress.com servers and destroy them beyond repair, all of your data would still be safe and we could have your blog online within a couple of days (after the meteor situation died down, of course)”

2. Availability – WordPress.com is spread across hundreds of servers. The likelihood of all them failing at the same time is highly unlikely. This is not the case with your self-hosted WordPress.org installation. If it fails, all your blogs hosted on that server fail with it. And it’s up to you to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

3. Security – WordPress.com manages security for you and also provide fixes for any security issues that may turn up. Given the spate of recent WordPress hacks this is a critical issue. This more than anything would give someone a reason to move to WordPress.com.

Also following good security practices (like securing your admin panel through SSL) is a simple one-click operation with WordPress.com. When using WordPress.org, you have to install plugins to get this working or update your server to use SSL and install an SSL certificate.

To sum it all up, using WordPress.com may be a wonderful choice for someone that wants a turnkey solution that’s very easy to use. Very little stress and worry. However, just remember that a WordPress.com site is not completely under your control and that there are some design limitations.

If you are a small- to medium-sized business owner looking for a more robust, performative, and custom solution for your web presence, head on over to https://en.zaferhammour.com/ to request a free quote for your next design project.

The post 4 Reasons To Use WordPress.com appeared first on Web Designer VIP.