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Mandatory New Year’s Blog Post (Which I’ve TOTALLY Ignored Last Year)
🌟 Happy New Year, everyone! 🌟 Hope you all had a fantastic holiday! I certainly did! Especially, when I compare it with how 2024 started—with me feeling burnt out, anxious, and overwhelmed by a major delayed product launch. This year, I’m very well-rested. In fact, I even took New Year’s Day off today (yes, I know it’s a public holiday for most, but I’m one of those people who usually finds it hard to stop working). If my parents hadn’t visited me last month, there’s a good chance I would’ve been working on Christmas Eve too. A big part of this is because of Hubstaff, the time-tracking tool we use…
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Google Update’s Over: Now What? Key Takeaways You Can Benefit From Today!
The Google Update’s over! I actually cut it pretty close with the last blog. The update finished a few hours after I published my blog on Site Kit. I think this is the first time in the history of this blog that I’ve actually done something on time, and I’m super pleased with myself. Let’s take a moment to appreciate that for a second. I thought that since I’ve been weirdly obsessed with it (I’m usually very obsessed with Google updates; I just never talk about it here), I’d go into a bit more into detail about what happened, and the key takeaways that you can use to further improve…
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How to Set Up Site Kit by Google in Your WordPress Dashboard
One of the SEO gurus I follow on Twitter, came out with a tweet today saying that the August Update might end some time this week. So, in order to finish this mini series on time, I decided to get ahead and finish off with a guide on Site Kit. In my previous blog, I talked about how you can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap. But that’s not all that GSC is used for. In fact, if you combine GSC with Analytics, you can get a pretty solid overview of things like web traffic and keyword tracking. In the meantime, I’ll help you set up Site Kit…
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How to Improve Your Website Speed and Performance with WP Rocket
In a piece titled Top Website Statistics For 2024, Forbes revealed that 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load. Think about it: you have, at most, two seconds to get your audience’s attention, or they will click off your site. In fact, in the same article, it was revealed that users form an opinion about a website in just 0.05 seconds. The writing on the wall is clear: website speed is very important. And it affects everything. From web traffic to retention to conversion; everything depends on speed. It’s also a factor that may be affecting your site’s SEO ranking. There’s no point…
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How to Create and Submit Your Sitemap to Google: A Step-By-Step Guide
Google recently rolled out its August 2024 Core Update. And it’s driving everyone crazy. People (and this includes the place I work at) have been seeing a significant increase in their traffic. A lot of people have also seen their traffic go down (running theory is that this is a crackdown against AI-generated content and we all know how I feel about that). And I am happy to report that I’m one of the “small, independent” websites Google wanted to promote in this update. Check this out: Side note: I’ve seen a similar hike around this time at work too. Now, I haven’t done anything. This traffic has come out…
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Back to Blogging: Productivity Tips for Part-Time Bloggers with Full Time Jobs
I think it’s safe to say that this blog is a perfect example of how consistency is hard for bloggers. There are times where I’ll post on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, before falling off the wagon completely. In part, it’s due to the fact that this blog has always been on the back burner in terms of priority. That changed this year; I’ve been (infrequently) blogging to see how I can get traffic and improve my following. So far, it’s worked. But if you’re someone who’s interested in blogging full-time, being inconsistent is not an option. If you’ve recently started a blog, or you’re thinking about starting one, chances…
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Life Update: I Got Published in an ACTUAL Print Magazine
Long time, no life update, am I right? Yeah, I’ll stop trying to be funny here. First thing’s first, I haven’t abandoned this blog. In fact, I’ve been optimising my old blog posts and going wild on Pinterest. I’ll be posting a couple of blogs about that at some point here. Now, with that out of the way, this blog, as the title suggests, is a life update. For my new readers, I only do life updates when something big happens, and in the span of this blog’s lifetime, there has only ever been one other life update. That was about the first time I got published in a literary…
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AI in Digital Marketing: Is it Really Changing the Game?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a 100% chance that you already know quite a bit about the use of AI in digital marketing. After all, just by browsing through social media, you’ll find way too many tips from “faceless” Instagram and TikTok accounts on the merits of marketing via AI. Some say you can earn four figures each month. Others swear by escaping the monotony of the 9-to-5. While it’s easy to get caught up in both sides of the argument — some say that AI is your “one-stop” digital marketing solution while others have deemed it to be complete garbage — it’s important to remember that,…
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Blogging 101: What to Do BEFORE You Publish a Blog Post
It’s safe to say that blogs have been a hit since the very beginning of the internet. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner or a blogger. Blogs are a great way to drive traffic towards your website. However, if you don’t optimise your blog post, you won’t be getting any traffic at all. Think of it this way: you write a killer blog post, with all the right CTAs and information, and then you hit “PUBLISH.” And that’s it. Your blog’s now out there in the seemingly endless void of the internet. Billions of people access the internet everyday. In fact, about 7.5 million blogs are published everyday,…
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Top Freelance Skills in Demand in 2024
I recently got an email from one of you guys asking about the freelance-scape in 2024. While it’s been almost five years since my last freelancing gig, my Fiverr is still very much active, with 2-3 requests coming in every month. Usually, I’ll turn these requests down since I have a full-time job now, but it got me thinking. How does freelancing even work in 2024? If I were to start fresh, with no contacts today, how would I go about it and make $1,000 (or more, or less) a month? It’s an interesting proposition, and so I’ve spent the past couple of weeks researching it. So, with this in…